His mind was all alert and vigorous,
ranging over great questions and delighting in its own strength. To come
in contact with these able foreigners, not as the mere traveller but as
an important member of an English government, beginning to be spoken of
by the world as one of the two or three men of the future--this was a
new experience and a most agreeable one. Doors hitherto closed had
opened before him; information no casual Englishman could have commanded
had been freely poured out for him; last, but not least, he had at
length made himself talk French with some fluency, and he looked back on
his performance of the evening with a boy's complacency.
For the rest, Venice was a mere trial of his patience! As his gondola
brought him home, struggling with wind and wave, Ashe had no eye
whatever for the beauty of this Venice in storm. His mind was in
England, in London, wrestling with a hundred difficulties and
possibilities. The old literary and speculative habit was fast
disappearing in the stress of action and success. His well-worn Plato or
Horace still lay beside his bedside; but when he woke early, and lit a
candle carefully shaded from Kitty, it was not to the poets and
philosophers that he turned; it was to a heap of official documents and
reports, to the letters of political friends, or an unfinished letter of
his own, the phrases of which had perhaps been running through his
dreams.
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